Why Is Chloe Cole Laughing? Detrans Awareness Day Part 1
No Longer Transgender, Brave Young Adults Share Their Medical Nightmares
Hi friends and welcome newcomers! Good news: On Saturday, World Rowing revised Rule 13 to create two categories: Women and Open. Only women (from birth) are eligible for the Women’s category; all are welcome in Open.
This week, I attended ’s Detrans Awareness Day to learn more and meet . Here’s Part One of my report:
When I approach Chloe Cole after her Detrans Awareness Day presentation, she is laughing as she chats with another attendee.
Just twenty years old, Chloe is a “former trans kid” who has become the nation’s most famous detransitioner. Panelists at this disturbing Genspect conference on Capitol Hill include doctors, lawyers, social media experts, and five young adults whose doctors arrested their natural puberty, injected them with cross-sex hormones, and “chopped off healthy body parts,” as they tend to put it — or surgically implanted artificial breasts. Within days, months, or years, they awakened to horrific side effects and the fallacy of trying to transition from one sex to the other. All five have detransitioned, resuming life as best they can as the young women and men they actually are.
When I request an interview, Chloe admires my black-and-white outfit and playfully notes her matching attire. Her hair is black, mine white. I joke that our symmetrical styles prove that we’re both cool, and she’s laughs again.
I’m surprised she seems so lighthearted.
Mutilated and Permanently Disfigured for Profit
When Chloe decided she was transgender at twelve, doctors immediately prescribed puberty blockers — then, at age thirteen, testosterone. At fifteen, they removed both breasts, “leaving me with massive scars and permanent wounds requiring bandages.”
“I look in the mirror sometimes and feel like a monster,” Chloe testified to Congress.
She speaks candidly of “sexual dysfunction and that’s deeply painful to me because now I am an adult woman, I’m not a girl anymore, and that is a huge part of being an adult.”
Her lawsuit against Kaiser claims Chloe’s surgeons “mutilated” her and “permanently disfigured her for profit.”
An Autistic, Lonely Child
Chloe was an autistic, artistic, lonely child who considered herself a tomboy because she enjoyed things boys enjoyed: video games and comics. Puberty arrived early, at eight, and along with it, “unwanted sexual attention that materialized into sexual assault.”
Alarmed by male objectification along with female vulnerability, pornification, and assault, many adolescent girls like Chloe try to escape sexism, Abigail Shrier explains in Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. Who can blame them for being seduced by this modern message: Guess what? You don’t have to be a girl!
At eleven, Chloe spent time online with other young artists. Gradually, she “started to see more and more transgender-focused content.” The kids’ excitement about their newfound community appealed to her. “Eventually it became: They are like me. I must also be transgender.”
Breast Amputation Is Irreversible
Joanne Olson-Kennedy, a leading proponent of surgical remedies for teenage girls’ psychosocial distress, is now being sued by someone with an experience very similar to Chloe’s. “Here’s the thing about chest surgery,” Kennedy says glibly in a training video. “If you want breasts at a later point in your life, you can go and get them.”
Not true, says Patrick Lappert, a plastic surgeon who spoke at the conference. “You cannot replace a breast. You can create a simulacrum of a breast, but you will never be able to breastfeed, and because the most common operation includes the removal and replacement of the nipple, the chest is essentially numb,” nullifying sexual arousal.
“Chest masculinization” is the most common “gender affirming” surgery today, he added, because most trans-identified kids are girls.
At least 13,394 so-called gender affirmation procedures were performed on U.S. children (ages seven to seventeen) between 2019 and 2023. “Procedures” refers to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, breast and testicle amputations, and penile inversions. The surgeries included 4,160 double mastectomies and 660 phalloplasties on physically healthy girls.
I’ve Already Lost Entire Parts of My Body
Reality hit hard, says Chloe. At sixteen, she mourned her ability to ever breastfeed and worried about her fertility — still an open question. “I've already lost entire parts of my body. What the hell just happened to me? It was like one big fever dream.”
Never having heard the word detransition, Chloe made it up and was surprised to find many others discussing it online. Reddit’s massive Detransition Subreddit now has 56,000 members. Here are some headlines from members' posts today:
“I think I made a huge mistake”
“How do you deal with the loss of your breasts?”
“Regretting top surgery”
“Realizing that I’m a woman after all”
Only After Surgery Did She Feel Suicidal
Chloe does not blame her parents, who granted permission but “under duress.” The first specialist they consulted threatened them with a now-classic question: ‘‘Would you rather have a dead daughter or a living transgender son?’’ Chloe was not suicidal. Only later, as she contemplated the extent of the damage done to her, did she become suicidal. “I’m doing better now, she told Congress, “but my doctors had almost created the very nightmare they said they were trying to avoid.”
Patients who undergo so-called “gender affirming” surgeries are “at significantly higher risk for depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and substance use disorders than those without surgery,” according to the authors of a new paper at the Journal of Sexual Medicine.1
Chloe Has Found her Purpose
Why is Chloe laughing now? It doesn't seem to be anxious or rueful laughter.
Chloe seems to feel relaxed and upbeat because she’s found herself and her purpose. “I could be going to college right now and leading a normal young adult life,” she tells me, “but I’ve chosen not to because I feel so strongly about this. I've spent basically all the last of my teenage years and all my adult years so far dedicating myself to fighting this.”
Chloe now testifies to Congress and state legislatures, writes articles, gives speeches, grants interviews, and serves as the patient advocate for Do No Harm.
Some Trans Kids Feel Like Brave Trailblazers
I confess to Chloe that, having been an athletic, gender-nonconforming, lesbian teenager, I suspect I Would Been Trans — followed by massive regrets, like hers.
“You have no idea how many women tell me that,” she responds.
“I would have seen it as a brave thing to do,” I imagine out loud. “The first in my high school to have top surgery.”
Chloe explains that gender ideology – the belief that people who do not conform to sex stereotypes require new names, pronouns, identities, and medical treatment – preys on both fragile and confident children.
On the fragility side: Kids with trans identities are four times more likely than the general population to have mental health problems. Between 35 and 48 percent are autistic.
On the confident side: Gender ideology “also preys on children who have wonderful, beautiful, natural qualities such as being brave, stubborn, creative. Trailblazers. Those kids get sucked in because it affirms their good qualities,” Chloe says.
More people are waiting to talk to Chloe, so we need to wrap this up. We snap a selfie, and that circles us back to the black-and-white topic. “It's very easy when you're a young girl, and you’re in this world that has all these black and white expectations of you, to fall into this black and white way of thinking,” she muses. “The older I've gotten, the more I realized the world is not black and white at all.
“Even though there are only two sexes, there's a million different ways to be a woman.”
Next week: Part 2.
Selected Stronger Women stories below; see also #SaveWomensSports
”Transgender Psychosurgeries Don’t Work? Who Could Have Predicted This!” by Matt Osborne, March 8, 2025.
Love this. Her words will one day help my daughter b/c I will eventually find ways to say them to her. I do share them with my uninformed friends. So simple. It is so simple. So simply wrong. I adore Chloe.
Loved this. I have restacked. Thanks to both of you!